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We are so happy to announce that Jamaica Kincaid will be reading from her new novel here at the store on Saturday, March 9 at 5 pm. This is an event you won’t want to miss. Author Mary Gordon says of See Now Then:“ Sensuous and funny, by turns compassionate and cruel; her eye is never wrong.”

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, and Mr. Potter. She lives with her family in Vermont and California.

Set in a small town in New England, See Now Then (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24), is a haunting presentation of a family through time. As she lays bare the different perspectives of a couple and their two children, the author of the spare, lyrical Annie John and The Autobiography of My Mother questions notions of chronology and the neat beginning-middle-end of both life and narrative.

One ticket: $12 One book and two tickets: $25; $20 for members. In order to obtain the Politics & Prose member price you must enter the coupon code that has been emailed to members separately.

Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright, Antigua native Jamaica Kincaid’s novels display “a poet’s understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur” (New York Times), as well as examine the powerful ties and inherent loss in the mother-child relationship. Her first book, At the Bottom of the River, a collection of short stories, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and received the Morton Darwen Zabel Award. Paying witness to the pressures of poverty and British colonial rule, her other works include Annie John, The Autobiography of My Mother, Lucy, A Small Place, Mr. Potter, and My Brother, winner of the Prix Fémina Étranger. Set in New England, her new novel, See Now Then is a look at the manifold joys and agonies of marriage, as a family attempts to grasp the passage of time.

In See Now Then (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $23), the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid, a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters—a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England—as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, “the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then.” Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Since the publication of her first short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling—creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

Jamaica Kincaid, author of Annie John, My Garden (Book) and, most recently, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, reflects on Edward Lamson Henry's 1889 painting, "Kept In," the second lecture in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series. This four-part series is sponsored by Washington College, the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Free tickets are available starting at 3:30 p.m.; doors open at 4 p.m. Smithsonian American Art Museum, McEvoy Auditorium, Eighth and F streets NW. 202-633-1000 or http://www.americanart.si.edu. Free. (SqueakyChu)… (more)